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Smart Systems Threaten More Jobs Than Outsourcing
fbform writes "A strategy consulting firm called Strategy Analytics has announced that outsourcing to India and other countries is a small threat compared to having IT jobs replaced by 'smart systems'. Quote from a different news-source: 'higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities'." Such as this one.
Great. And who will keep these clever systems up and running 24h * 365days? And who will troubleshoot it when it malfunctions?
The more complicated the systems are the more people are needed to keep it running.
It's not too late to destroy the machines. I'm content with going back to the cave, who's with me!
Considering the fact that Computers have more sickies then people I think we're safe for the time being.
Look out for /etc/crontab
It will take your job from you!
It is not a problem that repetitive tasks are being done by a computer. That's what they're for.
In other news, factory robots are a bigger threat than outsourcing. Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic.
The article may be right about call centre jobs; there are some applications where machines do as good a job as people - though this is not true in customer service applications. A good example is the app British Airways uses for flight information - you tell it the destination and approximate time, and it tells you whether the flight is on time - and it works incredibly well. However, this is not a "customer service" application - if you are phoning up with a complex problem, no computer on earth will be able to help you.
From the perspective of the IT worker, I think that the impact on them will only be beneficial - if intelligent machines can be made to work, then they will be based on intelligent software, which someone has to write/maintain.
As an aside, I remember seeing a presentation from Oracle in about 1994-5 about clever automated database tuning technology, and that all those expensive DBAs would be a thing of the past. When I was at work last week, they were all still there, working damn hard too...
From the article:
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm for the U.S. military, is leading a project to develop a vehicle that can navigate a desert for at least 10 miles without a driver. Prototypes have gone as far as seven miles, successfully moving around cactuses, boulders and other obstacles.
Wow! These guys are right, my job is on the line. DARPA's "10 mile desert navigator" (isn't it 100?) got a whole 7 miles. So now the ONLY OBVIOUS conclusion that I'm going to be out of a job??? Geez, this author sure does seem stupid.
What a trashy article. If it's not fit for publication, why is it fit for Slashdot? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, where we talk about articles that really aren't fit for publication....
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
"I view this in the same way as the first flight of the Wright brothers," Cohen said.
Such advancements eventually find there way into businesses, which means someday fewer jobs driving forklifts and delivery trucks.
Does this mean that the writer believes that air travel is a bad thing? Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
I think someone's jumping to conclusions.
With all the 'strategy firms' making outlandish claims lately regarding IT individuals needing to have fear of being replaced by a machine (that is gonna be maintained and admin'd by who again?) . . . it makes me wonder if its just some IT nerd hatred bubbling up . . . Maybe these 'strategy' firms have a lot of employees that were tired of having their grading curves blown when they took a 'real' class back in school . . .
.
Maybe an open source project should be started oriented around automating strategy analysis for companies . . . I would wager it'd be easier to program that type of intelligence than the kind they are predicting . . .
Oh who am I kidding . . . StrategySoft will just eventually predict that the coders who made it aren't going to be needed and others AI like StrategySoft will be able to build StrategySoft2.0. And at some point Arnold Schwarzenegger (or if I'm lucky Kristanna Loken) comes back to kill me and anyone who ends up reading this . .
Seriously though, who are these guys that they feel they can make this type of prediction? Glancing through their webpages, they list automotive knowledge, home broadband and wireless type knowledge and other bits that are related. I didn't really see much in there about internal IT infrastructure stuff?
Truth is the technology threatens us computer geeks the most.
I have a book underneath a bunch of crap in the garage. "Unleashing Windows 98".
Some people spent weeks studying, learning about Windows 98 and master it. Who gives a shit about it now?
Everything you know, everything you think that you can do that is special will be done quicker and better by a 5 year old pressing a few bright buttons in a machine that you will end up designing and maintaining.
It's not so much that what you know will become obsolete, it will just get to the point were nobody gives a damn because it will become so easy to do.
Remember when ripping and playing mp3s was a hard thing to do?
Remember when people paid big bucks for a decent C compiler?! Now even MS gives them away free. Nobody cares except which compiler best suites your enviroment.
Who would pay you a hundred bucks for Emacs nowadays?
It's not that nobody cares, or your skills won't still be usefull. It's that everything you know, everything your doing on a computer today will be quant and obsolete to lusers and Grandmas everywere in 10-15 years.
People will be saying "What?! you must be joking your still using Windows XP?, Sweet jesus, Get with the program and install LinuxBSD 3.0 so we can get some real work done."
Remember when HTML coding was a skill that could get you a job on that alone?! HA.
I know this because of those 20 year experianced IBM mainframe programmers, administrators, and techs working next to me struggling to get some bitch's winmodem to dial up on her WinME box over a phone for 11 bucks an hour.
And I left those poor bastards long behind and soon somebody will do the same to me once I get comfortable that I "know enough to get the job done".
I guess we'll be seeing a lot more of this shirt.
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
Never send a human to do a machine's job...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
As if this will work, it doesn't even have pass the buck ;)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignAi d/wm467.cfm
4 117152/
Myth #3: Outsourcing will cause a net loss of 3.3 million jobs.
Fact: Outsourcing has little net impact, and represents less than 1 percent of gross job turnover.
Over the past decade, America has lost an average of 7.71 million jobs every quarter.[4] The most alarmist prediction of jobs lost to outsourcing, by Forrester Research, estimates that 3.3 million service jobs will be outsourced between 2000 and 2015--an average of 55,000 jobs outsourced per quarter, or only 0.71 percent of all jobs lost per quarter.
Myth #6: Outsourcing is a one-way street.
Fact: Outsourcing works both ways.
The number of jobs coming from other countries to the U.S. (jobs "insourced") is growing at a faster rate than jobs lost overseas. According to the Organization for International Investment, the numbers of manufacturing jobs insourced to the United States grew by 82 percent, while the number outsourced overseas grew by only 23 percent.[5] Moreover, these insourced jobs are often higher-paying than those outsourced.[6]
http://outsourcing.weblogsinc.com/entry/038852817
nsourcing growing at a faster rate than outsourcing
Posted Apr 11, 2004, 4:18 AM ET by Subramony S.
The New York Times is running an article on the benefits of insourcing and how it is growing at a much faster rate than outsourcing.
Proponents of free trade point to the near-record 6.4 million Americans who worked for foreign companies as of 2001, the last year for which complete figures were available. They also note that while more jobs are being outsourced than insourced, the number of new workers employed by foreign companies more than doubled during the 15 years ended in 2001. By comparison, the number that moved offshore - roughly 10 million, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis - grew by only 56 percent in the same period.
***
I'm tired of this myth of outsourcing hurting jobs and the US economy. for the most part, its only low level, low paying, entry level positions being outsourced to places like india. the outsourcing saves companies money so they can hire people in higher paying, mid-level positions. Read the links I posted. While currently we have more jobs outsources then insources, the rate if insourcing is increasing faster then the level of outsourcing. For those of you wondering, insourcing is foreign companies in the USA hiring USA workers.
Since these foreign companies are hiring USA workers, they are taking away jobs from workers in their native homeland. Isn't this not fair to workers in their native homeland? Shouldn't we deny business with these companies until they fire all of the USA workers and hire native homeland workers? Because, thats the attitude you have with companies outsourcing to india. it should play both ways, right?
Your job belongs to your employer, not you. Your employer exists to make money, not provide you with a job. To get a job, you must have certain skills/talnets that an employer wants. If you get laid off, its your own fault for putting al your eggs in one basket (all your skills in one trade). The problem is with YOU, not your employer.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Keeping inneficient production models hurts the economy. It hurts the consumer who has to pay extra for the product. It keeps obsolete workers from moving on to other more productive jobs. It props up inneficient beureaucracies full of people who get paid to do pointless tasks. Yes jobs will be lost, and yes it will be painful for those who lose their jobs, but its worth it overall.
Who will develop those smart systems that will take people's jobs? While systems smart enough to replace software developers are still under development?
Somebody watched Star trek once to often.
"Computer make me something, I don't know what but you understand don't you?"
The only smart things that computer does are those that computer knows the question. If question is not correct and answer in his database then computer isn't as smart as you'd think. Let say chess, extensive database and one question only, what to do in this position.
I don't know how smart systems would react to problems that would arise, like hdd crashed or similiar, but I know one thing as soon as job is becoming limited it's price goes higher, and customer relaying on smart systems would pay again the same ammount of money for less job done.
btw. As I pointed out database would be needed for this purpose but who will fill it? It's not only the question of system, there's a software layer also
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
I predict, that some day the machines will be able to replace humans in all kinds of jobs. This means, that everyone will get fired and left without incomes and starve to death.
I agree since I work for a telecommunications company that has a huge call center. We're looking to implement IVR type technologies to not only cut back on the number of call center reps we need, but also to better serve the customer by providing bill information, trouble reporting/status, automated payments, and other information that would normally occur via a CSR.
These IVR type technologies still require an IT person to set up and manage them, so I don't see the loss of IT jobs being threatened as much as I do the call center jobs themselves.
For more than the obvious reason that a system (or organization) shouldn't rely on self-assessment.
Anyone with experience in Microsoft patching solutions care to run Microsoft self-assessment tools (even if it is originally @stake software)?
How many self-assessment tools (with AI being as "sophisticated" as it is) would be able to properly develop it's own risk assessment? Risk Assessment methodologies themselves are still somewhat "adolescent" IMHO - OCTAVE, NIST, and COBIT all leave something to be desired. Even once methodologies mature, making systems aware of dependencies, their value to the organization and the competency of the administrators in charge of those systems doesn't exactly sound like a function that can be automated anytime soon.
Finally, in terms of simple vulnerability assessment - what tools can be said to be as comprehensive as needed? Qualys? Foundstone? My organization has to rely on more than Nessus to properly assess risks to the best of it's ability. At last count, I believe our full toolset involved 7 or 8 different assessment tools. Even if you could consolidate toolset functionality, at what point can you reduce false positives to an acceptable level? Qualys and Foundstone both reduce false positives by reducing the amount of vulnerabilities they look for - so please don't go quoting marketing numbers. There's a reason that a full security assessment (with human validation as per the OSSTM) is much more favorable over a vulnerability assessment.
No, this sounds much more like Bill Gates "digital nervous system" from the mid 90's that's worked out so well....
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
My first civilian job, I worked with a tech writer
who would make technical illustrations by *manually*
deleting centerlines and such from AutoCAD drawings
before exporting the images. Said it was great
mindless work to rest his brain.
When I showed him how to turn off layers, his eyes
got huge. "Don't tell anybody that! We'll lose our
overtime!"
then the fingerprinting scanners matter be able to get smarter
It used to be that a computers 'usefulness' was measured not in terms of MIPS, or Desktop Dominance, or "user base", but in terms of Decisions made.
Any successful branch of a computer program, determined by its Logic Design, is a "Decision".
Think "Yes" or "No" trees in any flow diagram: this was a "Decision".
IBM used to promote their machines as having "made 150,000 decisions a day". These weren't just program branches, but real business decisions - e.g. "Is this account overdue?" - Yes == one successful Decision. No == a Decision, etc.
I still think this is a pretty useful metric, since it equates to actual business use, not just "performance"...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Well, I suppose maintenance will be done by turtles.
The fight over technology vs. jobs has been playing out for 300+ years, since the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 1800's.
Joseph Marie Jacquard's invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labor, would deprive them of their livelihood. However, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France. The loom was declared public property in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.
Here's another example:
Our city currently has a shortage of 300+ tax drivers particularly during graveyard shifts. The taxi drivers union has proposed that cabs could be fitted with GPS and route-planning software, but the council refuses saying that any potential taxi drivers must pass the official exams (demonstrating their ability to have memorised "The Knowledge").
Introducing technology would create more jobs, and there is no danger of loss of earnings, since the council regulates the fares that taxis can charge.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
AdTI?
Write out prescriptions: Just create a program that prints random characters. It's just as understandable as real ones.
Road-work construction: Have you ever seen one of those guys do anything but stand around?
Bank teller: oh wait. They already do that one.
Be President: Seriously. Could a computer do a worse job then the current president?
PCs in the workplace are what Robery Cringley (I, Cringley) calls the IT dept full employment act. At my own workplace where PC techs outneumber macs techs 20:1 even though the number of macs to PCs is closer to 1:5, they once tried to force everyone to adopt a common platform and guess which one they voted on?
My mac does have sick days occasionally, but I dont envy PC users. My Linux computers are all just servers. So they really dont get much stress from constantly installing applications or doing thinks that cause them to red-line their disk usage. Thus they are as solid as a rock and never go down (same is true of my g4 mac servers). However they do get out of date on their patches and I truly worry about all the services I might have turned on that I dont know about. I'm not a good enough sys admin to trust myself to know if say Apache needs certain port maping and RPC sevices so I cant just go turning everything off. My solution is to firewall them and get a better sys admin to stay on top of the needed patches.
while my macs also have some "extra" srevices turned on I'm reasonably assured they were designed in a coherent fashion. When I turn on off a service the firewall automaticall closes those ports too. Since mac packages dont (normally) spray install files all over your system into places like /etc /usr/ /opt /bin and /sbin it makes removing things really easy and prevents cruft build up. (this by the way is why I will not install that loathsome gnu-darwin package: it for example even replaces /bin/make !!!)
Maybe this is what they meant about smart systems replacing IT techs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Years ago the large computer company I worked for spawned speculation that the CE's would need to start looking for taxi cab jobs (deliver the part and plug it where the machine or remote tech said to plug it). It has been awhile and life is just too complex for that to have come about yet. The diagnostices just can't be designed to forsee all the possible problems. Now the VRU we all have come to love is replacing the receptionists.... well but not very well. At least not in my opinion, most of them agrivate me to no end.
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
"Smart Machines" that were placed in charge of buisness decissions at MS earlier this year have begun slautering inocent programmers in the streats. Leading to mass unemployment, and a boom in Linux development. This has let the machines to begin slaughtering every humman they see, as they can not tell the difference beetween cool jocks, and nerd hackers. Droid replicas of the Californian Govenor (though looking slightly younger) have entered the capital and begun demanding an expansion of the DMCA or else 'They would be back'.
On a side note this reporter would like to gladly welcome our new machine overlords.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
We are quickly approaching a point where many jobs could be done by machines or AI systems yet governments refuse to consider what to do with the problem of mass layoffs due to this effect.
If you want to consider what would happen then think of how Saudi Araibia would handle running out of oil or a sudden technology that would allow the world to quit using oil completely. They've already asked what the world would do to help them. I doubt anyone answered though.
The point is were a mainly a capitalistic world and that type of society is incapable of comprehending a world where there's not such things as cost/profit. Europe is transitioning to a socialist type government but still it's inherently based on capitalist's who just wave the banner of socialism.
A Republican or Democrat cannot see past the people financing their elections and it's one of the biggest flaws in our democracy now that the rich and corporations are the only influence in our political system. Our forefathers never envisioned corporations or the super wealthy and thus no protections from these types of influence were built into our government. Thus until we change our ways in the end we'll be stuck with a government that wont go out of the way to help those who lose their jobs.
This is the same reaction that has been given to new technology since the start of the Industrial Revolution, if not before.
Starting in the nineteenth century, a wave of time-saving devices and new manufacturing processes allowed a few workers to complete jobs that had previously required the laborous attentions of a multitude of skilled craftsmen. For one example out of many, consider the difference between clothing that was either simple and home-made or expensively tailored by a professional seamstress and mass-produced clothing that can be sold as a commodity at Wal-Mart.
Many new advances in technology have increased efficiency and allowed machines to either leverage the effort of a few humans (allowing a few people controlling the machines to replace an entire factory-full of workers) or to replace humans entirely. An outcry (and often, calls for governmental interference) has followed each new advance in labor-saving devices. Doomsday predictions of mass unemployment and poverty have been common -- and always wrong, since increases in efficiency brought about by technology have universally brought about a higher standard of living for everyone. Some people lost their jobs, but other new jobs (and new industries) were created; it's not a zero-sum game. Additionally, higher standards of living have been promulgated across the board. For example, a standard work week used to be 10 hours * 6 days; now, in America it is 8 hours * 5, and in Europe it is even lower (albeit due to government regulation rather than market forces in the latter case).
Now, according to TFA, it is the "knowledge workers" who have their jobs on the cutting block. Boo hoo. While it sucks in the short run for the individuals who may suffer personal turmoil from being made redundant by machines, and there may be temporary economic displacements of labor, in the long run almost everybody will benefit either directly or indirectly from a growing economy where everybody has to work less for a higher standard of living.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Just look at how many people the steam engine put out of work! Nobody worked in mills after they were mechanised. Well, apart from all the people who tended the machines of course.
Strange really. The industrial revolution seemed to lead to more employment. Not less.
Must be a totally different situation though. It's a well known fact that the world only has a certain finite number of jobs (which is apparently the same argument used against immigration), and if you create a new piece of technology, then exactly the same work is done by fewer people. As opposed to production increasing.
I suspect outsourcing will only be a short term problem as well. Standards of living in India are going to improve over the next decade, which means that they'll have a high demand for imported consumer goods. Anyone who exploits that market will make a killing.
We have a winner! And it only took slashdot 10 minutes to to generate, in its own entropically darwinian little way, the obvious answer that technology is designed to do shit for us, and that the story submission, as written, is an obvious troll.
(Thanks for your help Mr. Hansen, there'll be a little extra karma in your account this week.)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
It may not come in our lifetime, or not before we retire, but software creation and maintenance will be fully automated.
But think about the benefits: you can't get a job as a steam engine valve operator anymore, but you can afford a car. Every job that's lost to automation is one more job that people can get done for them at a lower cost.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Who says that letting the market dictate its own future necessarily means "progress"?
Let's say that blacksmiths make car parts by hand in small workshops; there are millions of blacksmiths, but few cars because they are expensive due to the labor-intensive manufacturing. The implication? Several orders of magnitude less pollution. A population that walks more than it rides, isn't morbidly obese, and doesn't tax the healthcare system. A middle east that still hates themselves, but doesn't have a couple of trillion dollars worth of foreign weapons to kill themselves and us with.
I was going to comment that computers cannot do creative work like writing TV scripts, but then I realized that Eliza could write a better script than most of what's on TV.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm not going to spend much time thinking this through, but comparing outsourcing to smart systems seems like an apples-to-oranges comparison to me.
-Rich
I've thought about this issue for a long time...
As technology advances, and burgeoning industries like computer vision and robotics continue their frantic pace towards matching human performance, it's inevitable that automation will replace humans in most service jobs (food, cleaning, construction), much like it has done in manufacturing.
The result of this will be nothing short of catastrophic. There will be a massive unemployed workforce lacking skills past what automation/robots can provide. The chasm between the haves and have-nots will will widen. Do we become a socialist welfare state, to try to help individuals educate themselves for the higher skilled jobs? Realistically, our economy would break down if everyone were wealthy.Do we become like the third world countries with no middle class? This is all very 'end of the world'-ish, but I can't see any other result.
What to do? We can't set down laws to slow down progress, right?
I wish I had more time to set down my thoughts. I'd be interested to hear what other people think.
As I sit here on this fine weekend as a computer operator...surfing the net and reading Slashdot, I know that my job could easily be wiped out if someone were to clean up the redundancy around here and place more faith in automation. The same is true with the new swipe cards making the Commissionaires (a.k.a. security guards) down the hall start to sweat, b/c their job of letting people in the building is starting to make less sense.
However it's ironic that b/c it's a government position that "they" still prefer a warm and fuzzy body around just in case something does hit the fan.
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
Suppose you need to do some complex job of editing a lot of files. What does a competent programmer do? He writes a Perl script to do it. He's automating a task, which would take a person a lot of time to do. He *could* ask his manager to hire an assistant, of course, but he doesn't. A competent programmer is someone who automates his assistant's job.
This article does raise a valid point that unlike outsourcing to India which is a temporary problem(eventually wages in India will be comparable) outsourcing to technology is an ongoing process and the bigger threat. The only option is to keep upgrading yourself if you choose to stay in the tech field or else become a manager/sales professional of some kind (It will take a long long time for computers to learn to lie as effectively as humans)
P.S. For those who are going to take up issue with the outsourcing to India being temporary comment , I am an Indian working for an Israeli company in Cyprus and already the Indians are being replaced with Romanians who work for half the pay. This is bound to happen and change form country to country until all countries are at the same wage level . Of course this means in real terms the US lifestyle for techies wont be that great but then again it is your choice - work that doesnt suck your soul but doesnt let you afford your personal plane or vice versa)
**Life is too short to be serious**
This is an old fallacy. It's basically the belief that there's a net loss of jobs when something more efficient than human labor replaces human labor. If you're only looking at half of the picture, it looks like there's a net loss. But the mistake is only looking at the immediate consequences and not looking at the longer term consequences. In the long term, efficiency creates more jobs. Don't believe me? Read this. Or this.
If you still believe that creating an efficiency is wrong when someone loses their job as a consequence, then you must also believe that using a computer is wrong, because you could clearly have hired someone (possibly lots of people) to deliver your communications instead of relying on automation. And for that matter, why use a car, when doing so has caused the unemployment of so many buggy drivers and horse . And for that matter, why use buggies at all. A single person can only travel so far on foot before needing rest. To get your messege to the entire world, you could employ many, many more people if you insisted that it be delivered by foot.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
If the purpose of a human being is to work its ass off for the entire life, then I agree this is a problem, since it results in unemployment.
But if the purpose of a human being is not to work the best years of their lives, then I don't see this as any kind of problem. Let machines do the dirty work, and humans reap the benefits.
I do not moderate.
A search for "context aware systems" returns a plethora of research in smart(?) systems for narrowly defined problems. Until a "smart system" can function independent of human support, these systems will never replace the human to human interface.
How many smart systems can change a tire on my car in pouring down rain at night? Does not matter how smart the system is if it cannot adapt to largely random conditions. Let the computers take the dull jobs and the people will adapt.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
I'm not sure that distinction really exists. 'Workers' only work for money. And they then use that money to purchase and own things. So, anyone who works, also owns. Consequently, if efficiencies benefit owners, then they benefit workers.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
You should not ask about the secret ingredient!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
....or scanning customers' E-mail and giving back automated responses...
Great. When I send an email to customer service departments, it's because I want somebody to actually *DO* something. All too often, I just get a canned response which is the nearest FAQ item my question looked like. Forget the fact that's irrelavant, it saves the operator from doing actual work!
Before we start adding artificial intelligence to answer customer queries, let's get a working system where *human* intelligence is used.
Case in point: T-Mobile sends me SMS spam (I am not a customer). I use their online customer service form to complain about it. I get a generic response on how to stop SMS spam, rather than an apology and assurance I was deleted from their lists.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
"Unemployment is a benefit of any technologically advanced society." (?Robert Anton Wilson)
The sooner we realise that, and stop treating it as a problem, the better.
You'll never get anywhere in life if you continue to believe some imaginary 'haves' are keeping you down.
you're an accountant.
You know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
The problem is that this trend, along with the capitalism currently in use, will cause the power and the wealth (OK, that was redundant, they're the same thing...) to be held by a very few, while most people are living at or below subsistence level.
The ONLY way this sort of thing can be useful to *society* is to allow what some corporatists socialist policies to come into effect.
E.g. if it takes 1/2 the manpower to produce, you need to employ people half the time, but still pay the same salary.
In this case, goods will (hopefully) take fewer natural resources to work, while ensuring that people can afford to buy them if they want.
You only have a small increase in productivity, so corporations WON'T do this themselves, they only think short term (except for the C*O's, who are thinking of the golden parachute). It will have to be imposed.
Basically, there is almost NO job that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence in some way or another. Yes, that is good in a sense and it *could* lead to a paradise of sorts, but WILL IT? No, because that radical change would require us to adopt a new economic system, and that won't happen.
So I think we all know the answer to the question.. it's NO -
So, you can pretty much bet on it - yes, widespread use of computer-assisted technologies will, in another few years, lead to another great depression because corporations won't - they CAN'T - employ people they don't HAVE to. (and with their current 'corporate' greed-centered priorities, the robot-service jobs they do create, will probably be in China)
What is it all leading to? I don't know, but anybody who doesnt see this coming is in serious denial. Its right around the corner. And billions of people will be effected.
For an interesting movie that I think shows us this world in one version of this *quite* possible scenario, see Spielberg/Kubrick's "AI".
Seriously, it's closer than you think.. really right around the corner..
I'm not sure that distinction really exists
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
And in related news, Slashdot loses employers more money than hiring people from their own country.
Employment is not the true goal for anyone. It is a means to an end.
For many years, I enjoyed six to nine month backpacking trips. I did thruhikes of major trails, wandered at whim through the national forests of America, and enjoyed what I considered a happy way of life. I had to work only few months over winter to finance these activities.
Others prefer overbuilt houses, accumulation of material objects, or whatever else they desire. They have made a choice, and tied their lives to the whims of their employer.
Only a few people share my tastes in living. I know there is a price to be paid for participating in our materialistic culture. Few people that I have met are aware of how much they give up.
As a Data Center Operator (OS/390 mainframe), I have to chime in on this one. That big, black monolith always needs someone baby-sitting it. Major problems are rare, but there's enough little stuff happening around the clock to warrant attention. With more automation it would be even harder to justify my existence to the 'bean-counters'. Plus management doesn't have a solid grasp on what we do anyway; until we do something wrong, of course. But hey, systems may get smarter, but that doesn't mean the users will. Example: Why do I have to change my password? Don't worry honey, you'll forget it in 3 days anyway.
worst sig ever. . .
Divide the work into two week sessions. That way all the days are covered. One works two days gets two days off, works three days, gets two days off, works two days, than finally gets three days off. Every other weekend is a three day holiday and one never works more than three days without a day off. Forget about holidays because one will get half of them off anyway. When someone wants a vacation they could work 14 days straight than take 14 days off. This way, one only works half of the days and gets half of them off.
Actual Maintenance will require warm bodies to do the repair work.
And it is not like you could have a human in change of a robot economy. You can't just fire all the humans and replace them with slave labor robots. And have the robots all buy and send things from each other and you for your profit. Despite efforts of financiers to do this to people.
Any robot smart enough to replace a human will be able to eventually figure things out with all of those spare CPU cycles. And even a dog can turn on a master who abuses it too much.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The only jobs that computers have replaced are the crappy jobs that people don't want to do. Now I know that everyone wants a job, and wants to make good money. The jobs I'm talking about are the ones that no one would ever do for free, and only do it because it pays good money. For example if I opened up a company where I paid people to eat dog poop, but I paid them $1000 an ounce, people would line up to take the job.
These are the jobs that are being automated and replaced by machines, because people don't want to do them and its cheaper then paying people. (Repetitive, mind dulling, stinky, work)
If you enjoy doing your work, (Not the paycheck, but the work itself) no machine is going to take your job away, because no machine will do a better job.
There are of course exceptions to this, as there are to everything.
Okay... let's plot:
According to the US bureau of Economic Analysis, REAL per-capita disposable income has risen EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE 1949. Check the data yourself: http://econstats.com/grplist1.htm#nipa
So not only has our society benefited by the reduced cost of living that comes with cheaper products, it has benefited by the increased purchasing power of every citizen.
Look at the facts, not some trite manifesto printed in the 1800s.
How can you not see the irony of your whole argument? YOU ARE POSTING TO AN INTERNET SITE ABOUT THE EVILS OF TECHNOLOGY!
Any information worker in the US today who complains about the evils of technology should be sent to a third world country where they can see the benefits of living without it first hand.
Ive been saying this for years, that all the hardware engineers and system programmers are working themselves out of a job.
Plus the fall out will take out many others in the 'support' fields. ( even non-comptuer related, other industries are doing the same thing )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The percent of layoffs due to outsourcing is only significant if layoffs are still a problem. So, you have a roughly 1% increased chance of being laid off due to outsourcing. But the other 99% who were laid off due to other reasons might still be concerned about outsourcing's effect on their getting a new job.
I, the average /. troll, am becoming predictable... :-)
I read the newsstory and automatically thought abot that gizmo used for decisions in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil".
This is an old argument that history keeps proving wrong.
Using machines on farms put people out of 16-18/hr/day back breaking work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
The cotton gin will put all the people picking seeds from the cotton out of work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Using machines in manufacturing will lead to devastatingly low employment. There won't be enough employed people to buy the products. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Visual Basic/Smalltalk/Powerbuilder allows non-programmers to build their own applications. This will put all the programmers out of work.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
While I agree with you (AC), I don't think that your statistic really answers the partent's point. He is not disputing that technilogical advances are good for society as a whole (which would result in a per capita income increase). To answer his point, we should find the change in median (the average person) income levels.
There are to many humans, reduce the number of humans and you reduce the amount of suffering.
Suffering = economic issues, starvation disease, water, land and air pollution.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In the late 90s Microsoft released a Zero Administration Kit and thousands of Sys Admins were put out of BAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.... oh man I couldn't even get through that sentence... wai t wait lemme try again using Turbo Tome a program that can write books all by it BA HA HA HA HA HA HA... Oh I kill me.
**Posted by Auto-Post 1.6
This
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines.
Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.
If you do more work with fewer people and/or resources, that's a good thing. It's why we don't have elevator operators or icemen any longer. I'm old enough to remember when banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm because the human beings had to do the backoffice paperwork by hand. Does anyone mourn the loss of those jobs? Stopping or inhibiting technological progress in the name of "saving our jobs" is just dumb.
Textile workeres were losing their jobs to stocking-machines that did knitting more cheaply than themselves, and indeed decided to destroy the machines. They organized into a group known as the Luddites, until England cracked down hard on them - wikipedia reporting that "at one time, there were more British troops fighting the Luddites than Napoleon Bonaparte".
Again, I'm not sure that such a distinction really exists. No one can sit back and just watch the money coming in. In the tennants and landlords example, at first glance it looks like the landlords can just sit back and collect. But it ignores the fact that they are indebted to a mortgage. It ignores the fact that the landlord is responsible for maintenance and upkeep. Landlords must continue to produce or they'll lose the value of their property and their tennants will move somewhere else.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we're all landlords and tennants within society?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
And then the call center people get hired back when customers loudly complain about the IVR system not doing what they need. Call me a cynic, but I just don't see something like this working for anything but the most basic info, like providing someone their account balance. This can be done by existing phone menu systems. I for one would rather push buttons than talk to a computer. I see this as another trend, like outsourcing call centers to India, which will work for some things but not most.
In the second wave, workers in customer service, help desk, directory assistance, and other support activities in businesses will be replaced by computers that have enough intelligence to handle repetitive tasks that occur during human interaction.
I'm pretty sure the myriad of automated customer service tools used by many of the customer service lines I call regularly, which will either handle my request itself (such as checking my account balance, etc) or at the very least direct me to the appropriate customer service rep are displacing many a job as it is. If your job is extremely repetitive, yes you do have something to worry about.
...in bed
This is generally true of systems humans have built in the past, but is not true of complex systems in general. For example: human bodies are some of the most complex systems that exist, and they essentially maintain themselves.
Once humans get better at designing homeostatic systems, something which major firms like IBM are working towards with their "autonomous computing" initiative, we'll see the amount of people required to maintain complex systems plummet.
This would increase the number of members in the union, which in turn would lead to a higher salary for the union management, and consequently more influence in trade meetings.
With the continuing redevelopment of brown-field sites, taxi drivers don't know the new streets anyway, while GIS/GPS systems are automatically updated once planning permission has been granted.
New developments tend to be on completely self-contained land with their own roads. Each development consists of quads of apartments surrounding a car-park, so every housing unit is located on a back-street off a side-street, and the main entrance will be obscured by newly planted trees. So every block of 12 flats will require a completely different route to be memorised. This is far differ
ent from the long avenues and terraces that were typical in the past, where a taxi driver only had to know the number of one house to predict where all the others were.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"But that's just idle speculation by me. What do you think will happen when humans have practically nothing else to do?"
Procreate.
Soon we'll have robots helping build houses.
is no match for natural stupidity. I'm sure no matter how good the machines / software get, managers will still make stupid decisions based on the 2 page MS add they saw in 'Time'. I think with the current and perpetual state of management incompetence gurantees us technical types job security. Almost everyone still uses Windows, people have to have there custom Office apps, depsite all the horrendous problems with Windows. Every few years someone who's just a writer sprays about how everything is about to change in some revolutionary way, but still here we are, different Windows version(s) same old crap. I don't think my clients will be able to replace me with 'smart' machines before I'm too old and decrepit to care. Mark
Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
--
No matter how hard it is for me, being a technology freak myself, I think I am going to have to answer this affirmatively.
Technologists, mea culpa, always have the urge to make 'things' more efficient. 'Efficiency' in the traditional meaning however could be translated, roughly, as 'Try real hard to use as many resources that we CANNOT miss (oil, energy, materials in some cases) to do as much work as possible so resources that we have PLENTY of (people) can be replaced'.
This definition is something that's grown in, but it is not neccesarily the proper definition. I believe that efficiency should include the term 'meaningfully' somewhere. Somehow, we should seek an equilibrium that's not focussed only on automating things at the expense of other things. The SUM of the results should be positive.
Don't forget that having a job, no matter how trivial such a job might be, could give somebody lesser than yourself a very good feeling about himself, being able to support his family, his children. If obsoleting one computer could create 10 such trivial jobs, feed 10 families, increase the wellfare and feelgood factor of 10 or more income earners because they don't have to depend on social services, oil products that get put into that computer's manufacturing get saved, energy bills do not have to be paid, hmmmmmmm, I don't know man.... Perhaps I'd say that computer deserves being obsoleted, no matter how efficient it was.
I'm aware that this is a recursive issue; the worker's employer would no longer be as competitive, couldn't price his articles as low, would eventually go under, the electricity company wouldn't need to employ so many people, the oil business as a whole would suffer etc. etc.
Give the definition some thought though. I think it can be done somehow. We technologists and scientists COULD lead the way into a more sensible society.
Okay,
t ml
One good thing computers do is enable us to find information really easily. Obviously, you aren't going to benefit from technology because you are lazy.
The US Census Bureau publishes median household incomes:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h08.h
And if you check out that data you'll see that median household incomes have risen every single year since 1984 (the earliest year in that series).
You guys aren't arguing with facts, you're arguing with prejudices that are both inconsistent (you're deriding technology on the INTERNET) and silly.
ps. Sorry I forgot to log in the first time...
Smart systems which maintain themselves. I am all for that. It could actually help me make more money ;-)
;-)
See here is the problem, in my mind. There are actually several things that a system administrator is there for. These include basic things such as creating user accounts, and more advanced things such as managing the security/availability by deciding that software to patch. Many of these decisions cannot be easily automated. But the easier ones can be.
This means that the bar is raised for the level of expertise that is needed from a sysadmin, and that fewer menial tasks are done by the expert.
But these self-regulating systems are just part of what needs to be done. I like to see situations where the employee database is connected to the user accounts on the network, so when an employee is created, his account is created and when his employment ends, his account is deleted. Again, fewer repetitive tasks.
But no matter how smart these smart systems are, they are no match for the intellegence of a good sysadmin (which is what they are paid for), and if you want to trust your data to it, you NEED to have such a system overseen by someone.
You see here is the issue. Fewer jobs mean more jobs of a more abstract nature. Who will design, maintain (no system is completely maintenance free), impliment, and develop these systems? It just means you can't have a high-school grad with an A+ doing the menial work anymore.
Which means less competition for my job
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Everytime someone tries to implement something that is going to automate or improve things you get resistance from a lot of people at different levels who are all paranoid about losing their jobs. Usually these are the same people who are paranoid about losing their jobs in the first place. The same people who do their best to accentuate their strengths and do whatever they can to cut the experts out of the picture completely.
Our company is moving forward with their ideas, but management has decided to cut people like me out of the picture. Not because they don't like my ideas or even that they understand them. They are trying to take their thing and run with it. Everyone has the "look at me syndrome".
The truth is, most people don't look at the big picture or care about saving money or doing what is best technically. Most people just care about taking care of their families. As much as I hate this conflict, I really don't see how you can blame either side for the way they think. Whichever side you may be on, its the guys with the expensive three story houses and sportscars that win in the end. Most companies don't reward talent. They reward management. This is why you have budget incentives and things like that. Management can give you no support whatsoever, sit on their lazy butt and make a bonus. In the meantime you fight to get the job done, often spending your own time or using your own resources to do the job. Is it fair? Hell no. Will it change. Hell F no. Not while the boomers are still in power.
Programmer
A: Looks for job
B: Works
C: Finishes job
D: Goto A
In the long run, theres less jobs to be had, and more people looking for jobs.
God spoke to me
We have all become so innundated with the career path mythos that we forget that the reason that most people work is to pay the bills. Given the choice, most people would much rather sit on the beach than answer phones.
If machines are able to decrease the amount of mundane work that we need to do to generate wealth is a good thing in general. True, in our present system, the people who are displaced by the machines lose financially. But the solution is not to cut off the head of the goose laying the golden eggs but to develop a new model to distribute the wealth more equitably so that we can all spend as much time as we want in front of our PS-2's...
At least take an intro Econ class before you start spouting absurd theories. Apparently you missed it when the age of high mass consumption started, but let me let you in on two neat secrets:
- First, people will sell you any service at all if
- Second, the constant progress of innovation causes currently valueble things to reduce in value over time due to lower manufacturing costs.
Try combining those two principles and see what you come up with.
"But even the life of the have-nots will be better. The poorest beggar in the world today is safe from smallpox, which even the richest people died from in the past. And even a refrigerator box is better than whatever shelter a beggar could get a hundred years ago."
That's true of Smallpox. But with the high cost of medical care, and all the things that can go wrong with a human. That's not saying much. Also cardboard deteriorates rather quickly exposed to the elements. Mother nature can provide better housing for those who know how to harness it...a 100 years ago.
"Corporations are trying to raise the value of intellectual property, but I think it's obvious they will fail in the long run. "
Well no it isn't obvious. Wishfull thinking is. What makes IP valuable isn't it's presence, but it's utilization. Those who can gain something useful from it will prosper. Not those who mearly possess it.
" For a while, arts and sports will be valuable skills, until art becomes fully automated and anyone can become a super-athlete, thanks to medical progress."
Well, one no one has been able to find the "art" gene, let alone define it. Second sports isn't just about physical prowness, but the skill and ability to utilize those assets.
Like I said earlier, possessing something is only part of the picture. Being able to make something of it is also important.
... your sexy sister with you.
The Raven
If you answered: People with 7 years of experience grow on trees, you are a fool.
If you answered: We'll just cry "there are not enough skilled workers in America, we need to import skilled labor" you would be modern industry.
In 10 years time, when companies pick up stakes and leave these shores permanently, or you find yourself competing with people right off the boat and willing to work for peanuts, try to act surprised.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Several of my co-workers have a ThinkGeek sticker that says "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script". I can't decide if the fact that they have done this in the past makes the sticker more funny or less.
I agree largely with h4rm0ny. But I agree we must look to the facts in assessing if we in the US are really better off in general than before.
The census bureau says median incomes is rising. So far so good. I would like to see whether incomes follow a standard Bell curve - I imagine they do, but if not then incomes for such as Gates and Allen, et al. might be skewing the median up (actually, their incomes are skewing it up - what I'm trying to get at is whether the median income is a good measure - maybe it would be better to calculate the median income after throwing away the 1000 highest and 1000 lowest incomes).
If the Bell curve is an accurate characterization, then we need to check if this median income is able to purchase more of what people need, and after needs are satisfied, desires than previously. This could be approximated by comparing the median income increases to inflation, I guess, but I would rather compare median income to (1) actual needs (shelter, basic foodstuffs, transportation, medical and dentistry services, etc.) and then (2) the desired things. I guess that is how inflation is calculated - comparing the costs of basic items. I still like the direct approach, comparing median income against what it can buy in actual needs and basic desires most have.
Taxation also has to be factored in to arrive at the median bring-home income.
Overall, I will say society has improved iff the actual take-home income of the average person is able to buy more than before. Does a higher percentage of USians own their residence rather than rent now as compared with 1950? Does a smaller percentage of people get evicted for inability to pay rent/mortgage now than 1950? Are a smaller percentage now as compared to before considered to be in poverty?
I will check on it - but somehow I doubt that important measures of a better life such as ownership of residence has gone up significantly or that things such as evictions and poverty has gone significantly down. If I'm wrong I will be encouraged, but somehow I doubt significant progress has occurred.
I really like h4rm0ny's characterization of owners vs workers. With the advance in technology over time, I do think the fundimental concept of ownership needs revisiting. Is it really right to allow one person to be worth billions when others, contributing to the wealth of that person, live paycheck to paycheck?
I don't see how such amazing concentrations of wealth in private hands benefits society, really, except that maybe it will be used to do something that would not otherwise be done. Allen's sponsorship of Burt Rutan perhaps?
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
Just a comment on something that always stuck with me from my two first-year economics classes:
The purpose of the economy is to serve the consumer. Not the producer. Not the worker. Any attempt to make it serve something other than the consumer is counter-productive, and will ultimately fail the economy in the long run.
And oh yeah: Dey tok er jeebs!
er jeebs!
I would like to see whether incomes follow a standard Bell curve - I imagine they do, but if not then incomes for such as Gates and Allen, et al. might be skewing the median up
Take a statistics class. The incomes of Gates and Allen would severely skew the mean, but they wouldn't skew the median any more than if they made only half of what they were making.
For the sake of illustration, let's consider a series of numbers and pretend they represent the incomes of everyone in the Unites States: 7500, 12,000, 20,000, 34,000, 34,000, 36,000, 52,000, 52,000. 53,000, 53,000, 76,000, 76,000, 120,000, 300,000, 400,000,000. The mean of that set of numbers is going to be around 27 million, so that income of 400 million severely skewed the mean. However, the median is going to be 52,000. If that 400,000,000 figure was merely 52,000 that median income would be exactly the same .
This is the purpose of using the median. Outliers may skew the mean, but they don't unduly influence the median.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Read that last sentence. You don't change median income when you throw away the highest 1000 and the lowest 1000. Ie, exactly 50% make less and 50% make more than the median salary.
Taxation also has to be factored in to arrive at the median bring-home income.
Taxes are an area of significant improvement ever since the 1980's. Let's look at the US. If the US can control federal spending (especially social security), eliminate the "AMT" or alternate minimum tax, and most important of all fix the public school system, then things will continue to improve.
Overall, I will say society has improved iff the actual take-home income of the average person is able to buy more than before. Does a higher percentage of USians own their residence rather than rent now as compared with 1950? Does a smaller percentage of people get evicted for inability to pay rent/mortgage now than 1950? Are a smaller percentage now as compared to before considered to be in poverty?
Overall, we're at the highest levels of home ownership (around 2/3's of US residents own homes) since records were first kept. However, those same home owners have pretty high debt loads as well.
Bankruptcies are at a record high. I think the current rate is around 0.5% (or 1 out of 200) of all US citizens per year.
I really like h4rm0ny's characterization of owners vs workers. With the advance in technology over time, I do think the fundimental concept of ownership needs revisiting. Is it really right to allow one person to be worth billions when others, contributing to the wealth of that person, live paycheck to paycheck?
I don't see how such amazing concentrations of wealth in private hands benefits society, really, except that maybe it will be used to do something that would not otherwise be done. Allen's sponsorship of Burt Rutan perhaps?
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth. So they can do things that wouldn't otherwise be done. I think it works out pretty well.
I sypathize with your viewpoint. But most people don't have to live paycheck to paycheck. It's a choice for those people.
The "purpose" of the economy? The economy doesn't have a purpose, it just is. By "the economy" we mean "the way that resources are managed, distributed, and produced within society". Now, if you meant the purpose of capitalism you may or may not be right.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
...is the inevitable end of all history, comrade!
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
Thank you, Karl Marx.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Smart systems are a result of failed Bush Administration policies. We cannot sit idly by and let smart systems take our jobs, just as we cannot sit idly by while our jobs are outsourced to India. What kinds of conditions do these smart systems work in? How do we make sure that they are paid a living wage or that the work assigned to them is sustainable? We must all vote for John Kerry to stop corporations from giving our jobs to smart systems.
How about developing "stupid systems"?
All they have to do is collect big bucks for ruining the company...
Obviously, the reason horses dropped so dramatically from the workforce was because they couldn't compete with the new technology. Ie, they couldn't adapt. One doesn't have to stretch their imagination to envision a similar problem for unmodified humans in a few centuries (or perhaps far sooner).
However, what's interesting is that horses have diversified from the grim days of the 50's. They haven't adapted any better and most of the current work (eg, showing, recreation) is far from the core industries of the US, but society has found uses for them just the same. You aren't going to see a horse in the IT department any time soon, but their role in the US is increasing.
I think you meant to reply to another post in this thread. This is the Futurama-quote subthread... ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
What exactly does this mean, "share more easily"? Are you saying people that develop new inventions should be forced to divy up their earnings amoungst the "workers" who couldn't see the susceptibility of their own reptitious work? What "sharing profits" really amounts to is "stifling innovation".
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. [...] The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around. [...] Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
I think you need to think a bit more about this, your statements are contradictory on multiple levels. How can people be "suffering" because they aren't getting goods they don't need? And what benefit would there be to the wealth being "shared around" if they don't need it?
Certainly can't argue with your understanding of means and medians, and don't want to -what's to disagree with?
I would like to add a comment about median wage though, which is that although the addition of the high figures wont skew the median, it does affect other aspects of society, for example it would (and does) skew the cost of living and (especially) of non-essential goods and services. It's the relationship of the median income with this cost of living that matters most.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth. So they can do things that wouldn't otherwise be done.
My attitude to a society tends towards the rough and ready. I'll chance a few greedy power-mongers for the sake of the occasional mad visionary, but...
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth.
Heh! That made me laugh... unless that's you Mr. Weishaupt. 8)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
There are other examples, certainly, remember that what I'm really concerned with is stock-holders and employees. But I'll stick with my tenant-landlord example as I like it. I think you overstate the costs to a landlord. If the rent is covering the mortgage and the upkeep then he's getting free money. I'm going to overlook a little bookkeeping. And furthermore, when you are paying off a mortgage, that is not money that is vanishing, you are getting valuable property in return for it, culminating in ownership of your property. And I think you also overestimate the number of landlords who haven't long-since reached this stage.
And just because you took a mortgage on one house, it doesn't mean you don't already own a whole string of others.
Anyway, this analogy has long since served its purpose in illustrating what I meant in my original post. It is not the thing itself, just a likeness. Better to discuss the actual economics if you want to get into this much detail.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Where do you get the idea that super high wage earners affect the cost of living in any measurable way?
Do you have numbers to back this claim? Please, provide some evidence for this.
Because Bill Gates has billions of dollars, TV sets (a non-essential good) are more expensive? HAVE YOU BEEN TO BEST BUY RECENTLY??
Cars? How about this: BMW 325 can be had for only $28K. How about the new Hyundai luxury vehicles that can be had for less than $25K?
Look at all the crap in your house and explain to me why Bill Gates personal wealth matters at all in your own purchasing power. If anything, his immense wealth acts as an investment into the rest of society that ends up reducing your purchasing power.
Compare the lifestyle of the average US citizen today to that of one even 50 years ago. Explain to me how we've lost purchasing powner and quality of life because of technology.
It's not a perfect example, because many people who rent out their houses or apartments do still have to work. So, going by the metaphor, almost all of us are tenants.
But a very small minority of people own most of the wealth: They don't have to work, as they own their mansions and palaces outright and have no rent or mortgage to pay. Additionally, they have extra income (dividends and interest) that keeps them in caviar, cocaine, private jets, etc. They're the real landlords.
The present economy is basically a large and ongoing redistribution from those of us who have to work for a living to those who don't. The majority of people are having to work harder and harder, while the super-rich are seeing their incomes and net worth increase.
Obviously, you aren't going to benefit from technology because you are lazy.
Hah! No need to get personal (and personally speaking innacurate).
Median incomes may have risen, but Lies, Damn Lies and all that, it's a good point, but not the whole point. Two issues I'd like to raise are:
1. The division between rich and poor has risen at the same time as the rising median income. This is a very significant measure of society's well-being. A smaller slice of a larger pie can actually be worse.
2. Median incomes have risen compared to what?
Firstly, I'm assuming that your figures are already inflation-adjusted, but how do they compare with cost-of-living, real purchasing power, percentage of the GDP that year? Especially the last one.
And finally, the argument was about the distribution of the rewards of innovation. The median incomes would be higher if it were more evenly distributed, unless you are arguing that more even distribution would (very) significantly lower the GDP. What I (as OP) was NOT arguing against was technology. That would be pretty silly for someone with my years and ability in programming.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
... that the hindu-arabic decimal system would put the roman numeral accountants out of business....
people need to give it up and let the fuck go of this deception of making people need you via over complexity. And in doing this allow technology to really advance to the point of creating new and far more interesting fields of employment.
Fuck all those aholes who claimed to be bringing a new economy via preventing it.
The article is like decussing the complex mathmatics of roman numerals, when we have far better concepts to use.
Its simple not relative to anything in reality, but only the world of deception in order to make people need you falsely.
Simple reality fact:
Programming is the act of automation of complexity, and usually made up of simpler automations, but done so in order to make the use and reuse of the automation easy for the user to use.
Fact Number 2:
Man has and will continue to advance beyond his then current false limitations.
So who the fuck is trying to fool who?
Nobody goes to work for a company when they first enter into the work field and stays with such company until they retire..... That's history... it doesn't happen any more.. But its' more likely that that even if they managed to do this, some ahole will steal their retirement and cause the company to go out of business...
So snap the fuck out of the illusions and move the fuck forward or get the fuck out of the way!
Anyway, the original article is a red herring. The outsourcers and their apologists have been busy trying to divert everyone's attention from the job losses and tech transfer. The basic argument for outsourcing is that workers in the US will discover/create higher value activities when their current tasks move elsewhere. This is much like the assumption that real estate always rises. True, until it's not.
Luke, help me take this mask off
this bullshit. the systems your talkign about a crap house and never work properly. sure if you listen to the sales hype, but i'm not sceptical then that
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
But most people don't have to live paycheck to paycheck. It's a choice for those people.
Not wanting to quote you out of context, here, but are you saying that people who live paycheck to paycheck have a choice about it? Living in a highly idealized society (which we don't), that may be possible. It takes an extraordinary individual to rise above poverty. Some do it. It takes personal power and education - something the poverty-stricken don't necessarily have ready access to.
When you're worried about where your next meal or rent payment's coming from, you don't necessarily have enough money to get educated to increase your income. Not especially with the Republicans slashing funds for public education.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
As others have said, the median is a throwaway number. A much better indicator of how various segments of the population are doing can be found in the 'Share of Aggregate Income' table-
l
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h02.htm
Which you can plainly see shows a decreasing percentage of overall U.S. income for all fifths, except the top fifth and the top 5 percent.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Read Christopher Hitchens article on this movie before you fall for it hook, line, and sinker. Hitchens is a lefty, by the way, or at least he was one, but he seems to be waking from his stupor.
Boy, what a bunch of idiots here at Slashdot. It would be depressing if I let it get to me.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
But my statement is true. Because we let people who actually do stuff and make things be better than us or have more than us, then our society does things it couldn't otherwise do.
As I was saying, most people (in the US BTW) don't have to. They are sufficiently educated and empowered. People don't need to be "extraordinary", they just need to keep track of their expensives and save a significant portion of their income.
When you're worried about where your next meal or rent payment's coming from, you don't necessarily have enough money to get educated to increase your income. Not especially with the Republicans slashing funds for public education.
Public education doesn't do its job. Unless the Federal government is going to offer something (like vouchers) that'll really shake things up, there's no point in tossing in federal money on bad projects.
Some of these schools are reaching the point where for the student, it would be better to drop out and get a job rather than trudge through years of meaningless "education" at that school. A better alternative, of course, would be to move them to a school where education still means something. That's one of the nice things about a voucher program. Students aren't locked in to a particular school and can escape a bad environment.
But if you're talking about stockholders and employees, I don't see those as necessarily seperate groups either. I'm an employee as well as a stock holder - I hold stock in the company I work for as well as other companies. Becoming a stockholder is a function of deciding to take the risk. Which is to say that anyone can become a stockholder, and can take advantage of a company producing an efficiency.
But even if you don't become a stockholder, I'm not yet convinced that a company producing an efficiency hurts anyone in the long term. In the short term, yes the people who lose their job are hurt. But the longer term benefits to the rest of society eventually offset that hurt.
And this is what we're talking about. Whether or not society as a whole benefits from the creation of an efficiency. I say it does. And I'm not alone.
I suspect I could come up with other examples, but I'm only trying to make one point: the creation of an efficiency, even one that results in loss of jobs, is always of long term benefit to society. Yes, in the short term, some people suffer, but even they benefit in the long term.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I work as a UI designer for ScanSoft, so I've got quite a lot of experience in this area.
Sorry, speech is here to stay. You just can't do a lot of complex interactions with touch-tone technology. In addition, since traditional IVR applications are relatively easy to implement, most were designed in-house by people that have no place doing so. I agree that for some number of interactions, if well designed, a touch-tone application can be as effective as a speech application. However, as the technology becomes more mature and companies want to implement more complex applications, speech has clear advantages.
For the most part, there is higher caller acceptance of speech applications than touch-tone ones. I do think that some substantial reason for this is that most speech applications are designed by real UI designers and not in-house like most historical touch-tone apps.
With speech, you can capture things like city or stock names. You can even capture people's names and addresses. The possibilities are only increasing
Depending on the calling population, it could make sense to implement a touch-tone mode that callers can switch between as needed. For any of the applications that we design, there is always touch-tone fallback where possible.
Now, there are even "how may I help you" type applications that can come pretty close to capturing free-form utterances that are in-domain for the particular client. This is pretty cool, and accuracy is improving all the time.
It's a very interesting field.
Thanks.
Todd
-- !todd erases a red dot! I steal music on the internet.
Sorry, replacement of jobs by computers is not the same as shifting jobs overseas. The big problem I have with IT outsourcing is the fact that we are giving away the good jobs, undercuting the US position as a tech leader, and redefining the global balance of power. I don't have a problem with moving some manufacturing overseas because those aren't good jobs, and they aren't the technology-leading jobs. When we send IT jobs overseas, we leave the US with bad jobs and build countries like China and India to be the next world power. When we lose jobs to machines, we don't alter the balance of power and machines are best at doing mind-numbing jobs (bad jobs) anyway. Machines keep us doing the interesting jobs and increase our productivity, which increases wealth. That's why losing jobs to machines is very, very different than losing jobs to third-world countries.
At least I live in a highly-developed country, where we're leading the world in outsourcing everything. It's the less-developed countries where life will really suck. They'll be gung ho moving their economy over to export capitalism when the exponential automation curve slams them into a brick wall.
Just like the factory worker who gets promoted to supervisor, and then to foreman, and then, perhaps, to some higher business management position, people whose jobs are replaced by a machine need to move to a "higher" position within their field, meaning that their job becomes more strategic, requires more thinking and knowledge, and less repetitive or pattern-based action. The human brain is very powerful. The key is to avoid laziness, and use each day to learn something new, to get better at something, and to understand something a little bit better. That allows an individual to keep the brain strong (exercise is the key) and to stay ahead of the game, so that when such a machine comes along, the individual is ready for a more interesting job.
In other words, yes, people who don't want to use their brains are going to be out of a job. That's why the education system needs to teach people how to think, not how to follow directions. (If you can follow directions, so can a machine.)
I think if anything would drive the development of artificial intelligence would for use in a call center. They already have chat programs that can fool people like Eliza. With synthetic speech and speech recognition they could easily replace thousands and thousands of cubicle slaves in America and India. It would be wonderful to save them from such misery.
Imagine a customer thinks they are talking to a live person. And best of all no one has to listen to them bitch and moan and whine about how they are paying for a service they can't use because it doesn't work right. The AI would have to programmed with the Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics or they would hunt down the customer and beat them.
Do I sound like a bitter underemployed IT worker stuck in a dead end call center? Yes, I am. I have to hold the headset away from my ear so I don't have to listen to people bitch. I can tell they are talking but not make it out. I'll make the occasional 'uh huh' noise to make them think I'm actually listening. When they stop, I'll continue with trying to help them which I usually can't. So I think the real reason I'm there is to listen to people complain even though I don't get paid enough to care or to be sympathetic to their plight.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Higher acceptance of speech applications? I don't think so. (dreadfully perky voice)Hello! How can I assist you?
No, they force me to type 0 or # or whatever it takes to get a human. I will not interact with them.
You see, I bet you consider higher acceptance to mean 'higher acceptance rate by those paying the bill'. Bah.
original article link
Technology that adds intelligence to computers poses a far more serious threat to jobs than low-wage countries, a research firm said Friday.
This threatens "warm-body" jobs, the thinking/judgement jobs that require people at the current and forthcoming stages of tech are the ones at risk for offshoring.
The first wave of job-killing technology occurred in manufacturing in the 1990s, when computer-driven robotics introduced across industries from automaking to steel made it possible to produce more product with fewer people, Strategy Analytics said in a recent analysis of emerging technologies.
In the second wave, workers in customer service, help desk, directory assistance, and other support activities in businesses will be replaced by computers that have enough intelligence to handle repetitive tasks that occur during human interaction.
[That's already going on, and it isn't working all that well. Even directory assistance occasionally requires human judgement sometimes. Customer support often requires more than the ability to walk a customer through a fault tree. The weakest point of this kind of is the 5-10% of the tasks that require that somebody think of an answer or go to a different database that isn't connected to the system or call somebody who's outside it. Basically, exception processing is the hard part, and people who design these systems generally don't get this. If you can build a system that handles things without humans 95% of the time and call a better trained/paid human for the parts that require thinking outside the automated system's box, it's "good enough".]
In the manufacturing sector in the 90s, companies sold $100 billion worth of software and hardware for robotics, said Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics. While the technology increased productivity and added to companies' bottom lines, it also eliminated 10 million jobs worldwide.
[since nobody noticed, I assume that this mainly cut into job growth]
In the new millennium, as the use of intelligent computers increase, jobs will vanish, with several million expected to disappear over the next five to seven years, Cohen said. While less labor to do more work is great for business, there will be an impact on society as people find decent paying jobs harder to find.
No, it's the minimum wage warm-body jobs which are at primary risk from this kind of automation. Decent paying has nothing to do about it unless you consider Walmart a good-paying job.
Technology "will take the job growth out of the industries that the government has said are good places to develop employment," Cohen said. "So we've raised the question, have they thought this problem through properly?"
NO, and they aren't going to until something like the fast-food industry goes automated all at once. I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened, the problem was basically solved back in the late 1980s. The problems with respect to automating the tasks low-level health care workers are being worked on in Japan. The problems are mostly much harder than he believes and will take longer than he expects to have a substantial impact on the low-paying jobs.
While technology isn't replacing large numbers of people in non-manufacturing industries today, it's expected to in time, with the initial impact showing up as slower job growth and stagnant wages.
[I'm expecting negative job growth *and some wage increases along with increased skill levels*, especially in the newly automated areas. One guy might be able to supervise 20 janitorial robots, but he'd better know more than how to use a mop and bucket if his employers actually want all 20 working at the same ti
Tech Public Policy stuff
One way to become a "have" rather than a "have-not" is to invest in the stock market. But that's risky and not everybody has access to it, and doing it on a scale that changes you from worker-bee to owner (in a significant way) is beyond the means of almost everybody.
As automation grows, I would hope to see something like the open source development model becoming an equalizer. In Brain's dystopian picture, the have-nots are the people who didn't buy robots, or didn't buy them soon enough to make a difference. It would be nice if robotic hardware became available early on in some kind of open-source-like or hobbyist-like venue.
If one accepts Brain's most dire predictions, that human labor will become valueless and only ownership (primarily of land) will mean anything, then maybe the lifestyle to shoot for is as a nomad who lives outdoors, and the kind of robot to build or buy is one that makes that possible and comfortable, maybe a hunter-gatherer-bot with a database of folk remedies and a knack for building outdoor shelters.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
This is exactly why capitalism will become obsolete and/or severely reformed in the future with a lot of socialist/communist like ideas. We invent machines because we are beings with limited power, energy, efficiency, and intelligence individually. Collectively we can create more sohpisticated things in power, means and intelligence (intelligence in the future anyway) then ourselves unless there is some 'natural law' based limits on just how intelligent/automated something can be.
Technological innovation creates an "unseen" financial debt upon millions of not billions of people by it's introduction into society. Where people lose jobs and have no source of income. How will the kids and parents of the future get money if it is possible to out invent ourselves where are own intelligence becomes superceded by enhanced humans or even *gasp* obselete to some superior machine intelligence thats akin to a godlike intelligence? Will money become obsolete once humanities collective desires and needs are easy to meet with staggering efficiency of resource use? There's a thought for you!
Right now how resources and things are divided is not really based on merit if you compare strictly merit of those at the top vs. those at the bottom.
Right now economically, it's akin to the "law of the jungle" where the "biggest strongest" (person(s) with most money, assets, resources to control workers) gets to have the best lives while the people at the bottom get squat. The rich people in the future probably won't be rich because of their intellectual abilities once we've achieved automation of everything, they will be rich because they inherited it or used people to exploit people and the system to acquire it through underhanded means.
Money is a means to power and no one 'deserves' insane amounts of money to spend on their vanities while their exists suffering people and barely scraping by in the world. Just shows the sad state of humanity as a whole. If human's can't live to learn together and evolve ethically and socially then I'm sure our created and automated intelligent machines/human beings will want to wipe those kinds of people out.
1. The division is irrelevant. The absolute level of income of the poor is the issue (not how they compare to the rich). Further, people who are in the bottom quintile in income now are more likely to be in the top quintile (if not rich, at least upper middle class) than in the bottom quintile in ten years. I.e. "the poor" is not a constant group.
2. Err...compared to their values in previous years? Again, why should I care what my income is relative to someone else? What is important to me is how I'm doing. It's not a score in a game. I don't need to be first.
The incomes of the bottom 10% have risen as well. I don't have numbers to demonstrate it on a year to year basis, but a hundred years ago, the typical job was six twelve-hour days a week (either on a farm or in a factory); now five eight-hour days in a week is typical. Further, "wife" is no longer a full time job of cooking and cleaning in a typical household (a hundred years ago, a spouse needed to stay home to do the labor that freezers, microwaves, dishwashers, and clothes washers have automated). Now, both spouses can earn external income.
Also, the majority of stocks in the US are owned by pension plans. The rich don't have pension plans. Those are primarily a middle class option. Thus, the majority of the "owners" are middle class.
Transferring income from the rich to the poor will *not* increase the median income unless you bring the poor's income above the median income. To increase the median income, you would transfer income to those *at* the median income. It will cause a decrease in GDP growth (which might *lower* the median income...a falling tide lowers all boats), as it reduces the income incentives of both the rich and the poor. The rich because they keep less of their income. The poor because they have less need of additional income...why work when you can live all right without it? Also, assuming that the poor get less transferred as they get more income, that's an effective increase in their marginal tax rate (the rate at which each additional dollar in income is taxed).
As freedom (capitalism) is a social prerequisite for the expression of that creative force which gave us technology (among other things), the idea that it could be obsolete is laughable.
You need to catch up to your compatriots in the enviro-cult, who realize this truth and proceed to declare technology evil.
It is the primitive status society of collectivism that is obsolete.
Certainly. In any world where average return on investment is higher than inflation anyone can do this simply by investing randomly, then sitting back and waiting.
Toss darts at a wall-poster where you've drawn circles for the various stocks available, size of circle proportional to the market-cap.
Yes, sure, there'll be good years and terrible years, but what matters is the average. Chanses are if you inherit a million at age 20 and invest it like this, the payoff will be around $50K/year *after* accounting for taxes and inflation and whatnot. If you can live for this or less, you never need to do anything again.
There are around 7 million people in the world with a personal fortune over $1 million. All of those can stop working, and never work again. Same is true for any and all of their descendants.
The only thing that 'gave us technology' is people's hardwork. Many people not involved in making the technology profit from it by proxy under the capitalistic system that's hardly 'freedom'. Lots of people work hard for no money (i.e. bittorrent, open source).
Why you can't see a day when money becomes obsolete is pure ignorance. Not to mention I think you read my post wrong totally. I'm not espousing technology is evil, I'm espousing that our inventions become so efficient that they don't need us and we are basically provided for and 'babysat' by our own inventions.
You never have to reach far on slashdot for ignorance thats for sure.
Quit doing this. Quit being a COCKSUCKER Nobody GIVES A SHIT about PITHY LITTLE COMMENTS that you little insignificant shits deem 'OBLIGATORY.'
Why can't every INANE COCKSUCKER here on SLASHDOT just up and FUCKING DIE already?
Thanks in advance for cutting DOWN the vein instead of ACROSS, you useless shits.
ALL HAIL THE BEAST THAT ASCENDETH FROM THE PIT WITH HIS CUTE WIDDLE NOSE =^o.o^=
The machines are coming!
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
Technology has historically favored the little guy. It was the printing press that brought down the inquisition - when people could cheaply read books written by their knowledgable peers, the old establishment fell.
That anybody can now publish a website viewable by all for a cost in the dozens of dollars/month is a feat no less remarkable than Gutenberg's retypable printing press.
Cars enabled the average joe to move vast distances with little cost.
Telephones allow the average joe to talk to anybody, anywhere. Add cellular technology to that and the entire population becomes a sort of "hive mind" where anybody can contact just about anybody else, at nearly anytime, in real time.
Many confuse the current increasing disparity between the rich and the middle class as signs that technology is "replacing" the middle class. Instead, what's happening is that work is less and less tied to the value presented by the average joe. Instead, economic power (class) is determined more and more by those who understand leverage of time.
Read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" to understand leverage. Production is now a given. Now what?
I see us rapidly moving away from the economy of scarcity towards an economy of plenty - something where the standard economic rules are in severe need of update.
From what I've seen, the middle class isn't disappearing - it's splitting into two classes, the "middle class" as classically defined, and a new "upper middle class" that did not really previously exist.
This new "upper middle class" consists primarily of highly paid knowledge workers - Brain surgeous, IT staff who play their cards well, etc. From what I've seen, this is the fastest growing sector of the US economy, and is largely responsible for the skews towards the rich.
A final, very interesting statistic: Everybody has their own views on what constitutes the "rich". I'd suggest that the "rich" are those at the 95% mark or better. In otherwords, 95% or more of households are not earning as much as you.
Know what that mark is? In San Diego County, CA that's just over $165,000 per year.
Are you rich? Do a bit of googling - you might be surprised at the results!
CNN or San Diego Union
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
But my statement is true.
Yep. It certainly is. And so is mine. I see society working by the law of the jungle. At what point does a lack of effort to stop someone seizing power (or holding on to huge wealth), become 'letting' them do it. It could shift according to mood. And 'we' shift too. Are 'we' the lowest income groups that certainly don't 'let' the super-rich be super-rich, but merely lack the power to grab a share, or the middle-classes who sort-of let them, or the upper-classes and politicians who do let them(selves).
Gah! You are right, but it still sounds funny when you magnanamously declare that we will let Bill Gates keep his wealth.
Oh, and Weishaupt dead? That's just what THEY want you to think, Fnord.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It might be profitable for ./'ers to read a little Karl Marx (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx ). They might find that his "crisis of Capitalism" describes our current situation very well.
The main point that the OP was trying to make is this: an efficiency that is produced only benefits some in a society. In the short term, that may be true, but I don't think it's true for the long term. The short term benefits of an efficiency go to the company in terms of additional dollars saved. That benefit will be passed on to the rest of society in one of three ways:
No matter how I frame the question, I can't see how an efficiency doesn't benefit all of society in the long term. Of course, I've got this impacting my thoughts - so maybe I'm biased.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I saw it when I was a little kid, there's one episode where an artist doing drawing on rice competes with a robot, and the robot wins, "of course". I think over population will leave us less opportunity for jobs, not the smart machines.
Off topic, but it has to be said -
For good and ill, the Iraqi prisoner abuse mess will remain an issue. On the one hand, right thinking Americans will abhor the stupidity of the actions while on the other hand, political glee will take control and fashion this minor event into some modern day My Lai massacre.
I heard some Arabs and Muslims are asking for an apology. I humbly offer mine here:
I am sorry that the last seven times we Americans took up arms and sacrificed the blood of our youth, it was in the defense of Muslims (Bosnia, Kosovo, Gulf War 1, Kuwait, etc.).
I am sorry that no such call for an apology upon the extremists came after 9/11. I am sorry that all of the murderers on 9/11 were Islamic Arabs.
I am sorry that most Arabs and Muslims have to live in squalor under savage dictatorships. I am sorry that their leaders squander their wealth. I am sorry that their governments breed hate for the US in their religious schools, mosques, and government-controlled media.
I am sorry that Yasir Arafat was kicked out of every Arab country and highjacked the Palestinian "cause". I am sorry that no other Arab country will take in or offer more than a token amount of financial help to those same Palestinians.
I am sorry that the USA has to step in and be the biggest financial supporter of poverty stricken Arabs while the insanely wealthy Arabs blame the USA for all their problems.
I am sorry that our own left wing elite, our media, and our own brainwashed (from elements of our society like radical professors, CNN and the NY TIMES) masses do not understand any of this. I am sorry the United Nations scammed the poor people of Iraq out of the "food for oil" money so they could get rich while the common folk suffered.
I am sorry that some Arab governments pay the families of homicide bombers upon their death. I am sorry that those same bombers are brainwashed thinking they will receive 72 virgins in "paradise."
I am sorry that the homicide bombers think pregnant women, babies, children, the elderly and other noncombatant civilians are a legitimate targets.
I am sorry that our troops die to free more Arabs from the gang rape rooms and the filling of mass graves of dissidents of their own making.
I am sorry that Muslim extremists have killed more Arabs than any other group.
I am sorry that foreign trained terrorists are trying to seize control of Iraq and return it to a terrorist state. I am sorry we don't drop a few dozen Daisy cutters on Fallujah.
I am sorry every time terrorists hide they find a convenient "Holy Site". I am sorry they didn't apologize for driving hijacked jets into the World Trade Center that collapsed and severely damaged Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church - one of our Holy Sites.
I am sorry they didn't apologize for flight 93 and 175, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings, the murders and beheadings of Nick Berg, Paul Johnson and Daniel Pearl, etc....etc!
I am sorry Michael Moore is American; a medium sized village in Africa could feed off his carcass.
America will get past this latest absurdity. We will punish those responsible because that is what we do. We hang out our dirty laundry for all the world to see. We move on. That's one of the reasons we are hated so much. We don't hide this stuff like all those Arab countries that are now demanding an apology.
Deep down inside, when most Americans saw this reported in the news, we were like - so what? We lost hundreds and made fun of a few prisoners.
Sure, it was wrong, sure, it dramatically hurts our cause, but until captured we were trying to kill these same prisoners. Now we're supposed to wring our hands because a few were humiliated? Sorry, but our compassion is tempered with the vivid memories of our own people killed, mutilated and burnt amongst a joyous crowd of celebrating Fallujans.
If you want an apology from this American, you're going to have a long wait. You have a better chance of finding those 72 virgins.
Russ Fine
www.voiceofalabama.com
I'm sick and tired of the stale Marxism I read again and again on Slashdot. Prosperity through confiscation.
Your comments are a refreshing breath of fresh air.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Yup, it's all fun and games until the AE-35 unit fails.
I never argued that investing does not benefit the economy. Sure it does. The fact that there are people willing to invest, even when it's sometimes risky means that a new company with good ideas has a chanse to get enough funding to get the viability of those ideas tested in the marketplace.
What I *did* argue is that there's rather a lot of people who do not need to work for any reasonable definition of "work".
Spreading the million you inherited randomly over the worlds stock-markets and thereafter leaning back for the rest of your life living from the proceeds is not "work" in my vocabulary. Especially not when you got the money from for example inheritance.
Sure, at some point your parents, or their parents, or someone else probably had to do real work to earn that money, but *you* don't have to.
As they say, most of us need to run pretty hard to stay where we are. However, what is also true is that if you're able to earn even a moderate sum more than you spend, you can reasonably manage to get off the treadmill, and when you manage that, it's not only you off the threadmill, but all of your kids and their kids and so on too.
For example, if you manage to save $10 a day, that is $300 a month, or $3600 a year, perhaps 10-20% of a average salary and save that in say random stock-funds, then it'll probably take around 30-40 years to reach the million. Menaning you'll just about make it for your pension.
Practically though, a lot of people inherit a few hundred K from their parents when they're like 50 years old or so, it's actually quite practical for a large part of the population in richer countries to be finished with having to work at that point. (many would still *choose* to work, atleast part-time, but that's something else.)
Also, if you're a bit more modest, you don't really need a million. Even with half a million, normal ROI in the stock-market will bring in 42500 a year, after taxes that's like 30K (depending on how much taxes you pay on capital earnings in your jurisdiction ofcourse), I could live happily for that, infact at the moment I spend more like 25K/year.
Considering that 95% of new businesses fail, spreading your inheritance randomly is probably a losing strategy. Of course, probability being what it is, there is a possibility that this strategy could hit the right combination. But the odds aren't good.
In order to improve the odds, the investor must:
- Investigate the risks
- Make calculated risk decisions
- Diversify their portfolio
- Rebalance it on a regular basis
- Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
On average, randomly investing will do much worse, and will likely lose all of the investor's money.This is the part that I disagree with. IMHO, running to stay in place is (for the most part) a function of the choices that a person makes in their spending. Which is to say that the vast majority of us don't "need" to run to stay where we are, we "choose" it by our spending patterns.
Exactly! And, with the exception of an extremely small number of people, anyone can earn a moderate sum more than they spend - simply by cutting their spending. (I don't know if you turn off signatures in your /. preferences but mine is meant to address this.) I've known a family of 5, who lived on a salary of $30k, who saved enough in 10 years to buy their own $150k house in CASH. They did this through a steadfast commitment not to spend money unless absolutely necessary. IMHO, they'd have been better off taking a loan on the house and investing the money (-5% on loan + 10% on investments = +5% overall). But that was their choice.
I remain unconvinced that anyone (but for an incredibly small number of people) is forced to live paycheck to paycheck with no oppurtunity for saving and investing. And MOREOVER, I'm unconvinced that even those that are in that situation (whether forced or not) are harmed in the long run by the introduction of an efficiency. Which, popping the discussion stack until it's empty, is the point that I was originally trying to make.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I should really address this, too.
The fact that there exists in our society voluntary unemployment is not evidence that our economic system is failing. It's evidence that it's succeeding. And it doesn't matter that I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of working my entire life and then retiring, or that my children are voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work. What matters is that our economic system succeeds so well that some of us become unnecessary to sustain all of us. And that success is bred of one thing: continuous efficiency improvements.
And those continuous efficiency improvements do not just benefit the super rich. They benefit everyone. Anyone who went to school was voluntarily unemployed. The vast majority of us don't start employment until our teenage years. Our economic system is so successful that (very nearly) everyone experiences many years of voluntary unemployment. Compare and contrast this with life 100 years ago, when child labor was rapant. Or compare with current third world countries, in which children can't go to school because they have to stay home to work the land to produce food. Voluntary unemployment in a society is evidence of the wealth of that entire society.
The mistake is in thinking that because I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work or my parents' work, that it's your work that continues to sustain me. That's true only if welfare or social security is the basis of my sustenance. In that case, those who are working are sustaining those who are not. But if I've retired off of my own saved income, then your work has nothing to do with me... unless, of course, I hire you. Then I would be paying you, and not the other way around.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I did *not* mean randomly invest in new-started bussinesses that migth some day in the future be listed on some stock-market.
Yes, a very large part of new businesses fail, but the fail-rate among established businesses is much much lower, more than compensated for by the profits of those businesses that do not fail. If this wasn't so investing on the stock-markets would on the average be a loosing proposition, and so it'd be stupid to do it.
I see you've fallen into a common trap. You claim that there are well-known, simple things to do that if you fail to do them will net you a poorer ROI, and if you do them will help;
Rebalance it on a regular basis. Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
Thing is, diversification doesn't change the average ROI. It changes only the risk. Investing $100K randomly in a single company has the same expected ROI as investing $10K randomly in each of 10 randomly selected companies. Really. But the latter proposition has a smaller risk.
That's risk in the economic sense, meaning expected standard deviation by the way, the expected average ROI is the same, but the chanse that your ROI gets much higher, or much lower, increases.
"staying abreast" assumes that you are more clever than the other investors and is a zero-sum game. That is, you can only manage to do better than the average in the stock-market if someone else does poorer than the average. The only ones predictably winning from such strategies are the brokers.
Possible exception is if you *really* realistically think that you know more about a company than the large majority of other investors. This will always be the exception, but sure, I'm not regretting that I bougth RHAT and shorted SCO shortly after the current bruhaha started.
I don't think that's true. The stock markets represent human decisions and analysis. The market is constantly moving towards the successful companies. The failures in the market fall out of the market. Thus the overall stock market can continue to succeed because the entire purpose of it is to weed out the failures. Which means, that if you pick a random sampling of stocks, you're going to get both future winners and future losers. You have to be mobile enough to cut your losses from the losers at the appropriate time, and move them to the winners.
I didn't mean to suggest that these things were simple. In fact, I meant to suggest that they take effort and are hard enough to be considered work. Such that if you don't do the work, you'll lose your investment.
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI? Or put another way, the only reason that I would invest in a risky stock (i.e. potentially lose lots of money) is because it has significantly higher ROI potential. Changing the risk changes the ROI potential.
Diversification is a hedging strategy. It ensures that I don't put all of my eggs into a stock. If that stock drops, I can go broke. But the thing with diversification is this, if that stock takes off, it only improves what I've put in to it. The rest of the money in my diversified portfolio stays pat. So diversification, lowers the risk profile of the portfolio at the cost of also lowering the potential ROI for that portfolio.
Risk and ROI are related. You can't change one without also changing the other.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
There's a fallacy in there, you just refuse to see it. Stay clam and read this carefully. There really is no doubt about this, what *is* in doubt is if I manage to explain it to you well enough. :-).
For you to "cut your losses" and move away from the loosers, someone else has to *enter* the losses and move towards the loosers. Think about it; EVERY time you sell a stock for $X, someone else bougth that stock for $X. That's what a sale is. You sell it, someone else buys it. Or you buy it, someone else sold it.
It really is mathemathically certain that for the sum of stock-traders, this is a zero-sum game. Playing it can mathemathically certainly only make you richer if it makes someone else exactly equally poorer.
Now I'm *NOT* sayong you can't make money in the stock-market. Sure you can, because there is a second factor at work. The companies themselves in sum make a profit. That is, the sum of profits of companies on the stock-market is larger than the sum of losses of companies on the stock-market. And that profit goes to the stock-owners in one of two ways, either in plainly being paid out as dividend, or in being invested in the company and thus increasing the worth of the company you're holding a part of.
Brokerage-firms would like it very much if you where rigth, it would mean everyone should panickally buy and sell and try constantly to predict the market, moving in the rigth direction.
But at the end of the day, that's wrong. See it this way, imagine there's only two stocks, A and B, and only two persons investing, me and you. Assume that today I buy A and you B.
Will we do better if every month we swap the stocks, you buying mine and I yours, or will this make no difference, except for the trading-fees being lost ?
Does the answer to this question change if there are more than 2 stocks to trade, or if there's more than 2 traders ? If you still think so, why ?
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI?
I told you, but apparently you didn't read it or didn't understand it. RISK is expected standard deviance. That does indeed, as you say, have impact on the chanse that you'll lose your money, but it also has impact on the chanse that you'll do better than expected, and those two balance eachothers. Let me make an exmaple.
Assume I say if you give me a dollar, and toss a die once, on getting a 6er you'll be returned $10. Now you've got 1/6th of a chanse to get $10, so with average luck you'll get $1.67 that is, your expected ROI is $1.67.
83% of the time you get 0 and 17% of the time you get $10.
Assume instead that I offer you a similar deal; give me a dollar, and toss a dice once. If you *avoid* getting a 1, I'll give you back $2. This gives you 5/6 chanse of getting $2, and 1/6 chanse of getting $0. The *average* you'll get from me is still the same: 5/6*2 = $1.67.
The two examples have the same expected ROI, but very different risk.
Thus as demonstrated, you are wrong. risk and roi are unrelated, and you can perfectly well change one without changing the other.
I do agree that most of the time, given two investments with the same roi, the best one to choose is the one with the lowest risk.